Hui Jing Chen on Vertical Writing on the Web

In the multi-cultural region of Southeast Asia, writing systems go in all directions, in books and newspapers, store-fronts and signage. The digital world, however, is predominantly left-to-right, and this always felt like a bit of a disconnect. Fortunately, today’s web has evolved to a point where it is no longer a tall task to render non-Latin characters and writing systems correctly.
Modern CSS allows us to typeset for a dynamic medium, even for a language as complex as Chinese, with its tens of thousands of characters. And these same techniques can be extended to build layouts that were simply not feasible just a few years back. This talk aims to inspire designers and developers to eschew cookie-cutter web layouts and create designs that truly embrace the nature of the web.